I feel I let my readers down this last weekend with the minor publishing schedule. But I do have an excuse. It isn’t just that I was reading my friend Kristen’s novel. It was also that it is about a once promising artist whose life is crumbling to bits — very much by her own doing. And that reminds me very much of myself as I sit here writing this with my bank account recently liquidated by the State of California. But I am determined to be on my regular schedule today. Or at least, I am determined to get five articles out today — I’m not sure exactly when they will come. Onward!

Today is a great day for birthdays. In particular, there are two 17th century painters who I absolutely love: Aelbert Cuyp and Nicolas de Largilliere. There are also two actors I love: Bela Lugosi and Margaret Dumont. There are also French film director Jean-Pierre Melville and stride pianist Jelly Roll Morton. But I just couldn’t go with them. Not with my ever increasing interest in the American educational system and all the education “reform” fakers.

On this day in 1859, the great John Dewey was born. He was an education reformer — a real one, not just one who wanted to diminish teachers and create good little workers for the factories of the rich. In fact, he believed in liberal education. This is something that has largely been abandoned in the modern debate about education. Now it is all about how we can create more STEM graduates, as if all we need is better technology and the rest of our culture can just rot.

I’m reminded of a quote by Jonathan Kozol:

Dewey would very much agree with that sentiment.

One thing that Dewey did not do is invent the Dewey Decimal system. That was done by Melvil Dewey, who lived at the same time and place as John Dewey. But Melvil was a librarian. They are not related in any direct way, so far as I know. I admire both men.

Here is a short video discussion about John Dewey and his work. It also discusses his beliefs about diversity in education:

Happy birthday John Dewey!

On this day in 1908, the great economist John Kenneth Galbraith was born. He was an important thinker in institutional economics — a field that seems largely to have been abandoned at least among “educated opinion.” Rather than look at economies as a bunch of markets, it looks at markets as the result of interacting institutions such as business, government, individuals, and so on. Galbraith rejected the neoclassical approach to economics that economies could be modeled based upon assuming such things as completely rational individuals.

Galbraith is better know, of course, as a popularizer of economics. He was the Paul Krugman of his day. Unfortunately, in his day, there was also the anti-Galbraith: Milton Friedman. Friedman contended that Galbraith was paternal. Of course, Friedman’s idea of liberty was that the government make no decisions regarding people’s lives. He completely ignored the effects of private forces on people’s lives. To me, this is all very simple. In your day to day life, what is it that most gets in your way: the government or businesses? For me and everyone I know, it isn’t even close. I have almost no direct interactions with the government. But any day now, the AT&T bill will arrive and I will have to waste yet another couple of hours fighting over the stuff I thought we agreed to last month. For most people, it is their employer that is most invasive. Regardless, people who claim the government is what is most interfering with their liberty are either independently wealthy or lying.

But if you want to get an idea of just how important and farsighted Galbraith was, check out the following section from Wikipedia on what he wrote about the American economy. Notice how much we’ve reverted:

It’s not that a lot of people haven’t learned what Galbraith had to teach. It is just that our political elites have no interest in hearing it. On this point, Galbraith was clear too. He noted early on that when people got too rich, they stopped voting for the common good. Of course, at that time, they didn’t have Fox News and other propaganda machines to convince a bunch of poor people to follow them.

Happy birthday John Kenneth Galbraith!

John Dean is 76 today. He was White House Counsel under President Nixon and the star witness against the administration at the Watergate hearings. I am a big believer in loyalty, so you might think that I’d be against what Dean did. But I’m not. Dean was just smart. He understood that he was the odd man out and that Nixon’s inner circle — very much including Nixon himself — was trying to make Dean the fall guy. I don’t doubt that he would have stayed loyal had he not been pushed in that direction. But it is also possible that he was the George Stephanopoulos of the Nixon administration — idealistic and shocked by what he found. Certainly, that is the way that Dean portrays it now.

Dean is an interesting character. I link him very much with Barry Goldwater, and it turns out the two of them were close friends. But here’s the thing. Goldwater was as crazy a right-winger as anyone in the 1960s. The John Birch Society loved Goldwater and he loved it back as much as was politically viable. But in the 1980s, Goldwater became one of the most insightful critics of the right in this country. He seemed to be forever criticizing Reagan. And these criticisms were not that Reagan was making nice with the Soviet Union and other things the far right hated. Goldwater went after the authoritarian aspects of the Reagan administration. What happened? Because Goldwater of 1964 was, if anything, worse.

Now, this isn’t the case with Dean. I don’t really know what his politics were early on. But he was and is a great admirer of Goldwater. But now he is an even better critic of the right than Goldwater ever was. His book, Conservatives without Conscience, is very good. It discusses authoritarian personalities and how the conservative movement has been taken over by authoritarians. He’s right. And maybe that wasn’t so much true in the period between Goldwater’s defeat and Watergate. But it was probably even more true in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

So I don’t really understand John Dean. I’m always interested in listening to what he has to say, however. But he seems pretty confused about the past. And I think if he looked seriously at his own conservatism (I suspect he is pretty much a libertarian), he would see that it too is based on authoritarianism. As Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind, all that conservatism has ever been is the reaction to liberation movements. It has always been about suppressing the rights of the weak. On the other hand, I can’t imagine Dean voted for Bush the Younger. So maybe he’s a Democrat now. (Not that it would mean he wasn’t conservative!) It is hard to say because he really doesn’t talk about things that touch on policy — just what idiotic stuff the Republicans are doing now. And that’s always fun!

Happy birthday John Dean!

On this day in 1872, the women’s right activist Emily Davison was born. Over the last year and a half, I’ve highlighted a lot of important figures in the women’s suffrage movement. But Divison is one of my very favorites because she was militant. In fact, she was killed at the age of 40 in a political act, although given the circumstances, no one is exactly sure what it was her intention to do.

After high school, she received a scholarship to Royal Holloway College. But in her second year, she was forced to drop out because of financial problems with her family following her father’s death. She then became a governess and eventually a teacher, through which she was able to say money to eventually earn a degree from St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

In 1906, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) — a militant feminist group started by probably the most important suffragette of the twentieth century, Emmeline Pankhurst. Two years later, she quit her teaching position to dedicate herself to political activities. Today, she would be called a terrorist. She went well outside the bounds of the WSPU. She was responsible for violence and arson. This resulted in her jailing on nine different occasions where she staged numerous hunger strikes.

But she also came up with extremely clever forms of protest. For example, on the night of 1911 census, she hid in a cupboard at the Palace of Westminster. This allowed her to claim on the census form that her residence was the House of Commons. According to Wikipedia, “The 1911 census documents that were uncovered state that Emily Wilding Davison was found ‘hiding in the crypt’ in the Houses of Parliament. In 1999 a plaque to commemorate the event was set in place by Tony Benn MP.”

Given her death is unclear, let’s just say that she was trampled by a horse. But she became a martyr to the cause of women’s rights. As a direct result of her death, there was a great increase in male support for suffrage. Women over the age of 30 got the right to vote five years later. And ten years after that, women over the age of 21 were finally allowed to vote.

Happy birthday Emily Davison!